Mahsudul M Islam, a young executive of a mobile phone company, carries his laptop to the office to keep an eye on his share prices.
"But this DSE website is hardly accessible during trading hours. It takes ages to refresh just once, let alone check the desired stock prices," he told the bdnews24.com.
Islam claims the poor performance of the site has cost him significant losses.
Like him, many off-floor investors are losing money in the market as they find it hard to stay informed in time about falling prices of their holdings, when browsing the Dhaka Stock Exchange website (www.dsebd.org) during trading hours.
Retired banker Abdul Mannan, who tries to keep himself updated from his home through a desktop computer, said he was quite happy when his nephew first informed about how to check prices on the internet using the website.
But, echoing the young executive, he said: 'I now see it takes a very long time to display the prices. It's not useful at all.'
He thought it was far better trading at the brokerage houses.
"But, I am too old now to go to Motijheel and stand in front of the computers at the brokerage houses," said Mannan, who has been investing in stocks for almost twelve years.
Huge crowds throng the front of workstations at the brokerage houses during trading hours.
The alternative is tiresome and almost impossible: to keep up with the latest share price information through time consuming phone calls to the brokerage house operators.
Thus, off-floor traders have almost solely to depend on the DSE website.
Nowadays, the number of investors who trade from in front of workstations at brokerage houses is only a small fraction of the total number of off-floor investors, who trade daily on phone from inside and outside Dhaka.
Investors across the country browse the DSE website from homes or offices during trading hours (9 am to 2 pm).
However, due to low bandwidths and high traffic, most users cannot browse the site properly during those crucial hours.
The DSE website is hosted on a server of Bangladesh Online Limited (BOL), with insufficient allocation of upload bandwidth, said a DSE official.
BOL clients get a sort of an edge in browsing the site during trading hours, although most of the users throughout the country are clients of other internet service providers (ISPs) or mobile operators.
An official of the bourse's IT section said that an increase in upload bandwidth would resolve the problem.
"Currently we have to handle twice the amount of our bandwidth capacity," said a manager of DSE's IT department, asking not to be named.
Meanwhile, DSE authorities said they have been considering increasing their bandwidth but that it would be a costly endeavour.
"We are thinking about boosting our capacity but it would be very costly for us, and we don't receive any revenue from the website," said DSE chief executive Salahuddin Ahmed.
He also said the IT department had been asked to assess feasibility of building a system so that off-floor traders can get price information by paying fees.
The delay in getting share price information throughout trading hours reduces the opportunity for off-floor investors in taking instant investment decisions, according to market experts.
They said the inefficient DSE website was a major flaw of the market.
"Retail investors have no choice but battling with the crowds at their brokerage houses to trade," said Yaweer Sayeed, CEO of AIMS of Bangladesh, a private asset management company.
He also said delays in price information greatly hamper investment decisions.
"It is a major weakness of this market."
The number of retail investors in the market is rising. Investors of various backgrounds, inside and outside Bangladesh, are choosing to put their money in the capital market.
As the DSE is trying to expand its operations outside Dhaka, retail investors from different districts are also growing in numbers-a positive sign for the country's financial sector and the economy as a whole.
Market expert Moin Al Kashem, of Prime Securities, said a faster and more interactive website for the country's prime bourse was essential to create an investor-friendly environment.
"It is a key requirement to encourage more and more people to participate in the market."
